Intermediaries in the Medicare Market

2024-09-26

2026-03-31

The key outcome of interest is the quality of the insurance plan recommendation from an insurance producer (or insurance agent). Our primary outcome evaluates the quality of an agent's recommendation against what an expert would recommend. We are primarily interested in the heterogeneity in recommendations and response rates by insurance agent characteristics based on publicly available data and randomly assigned consumer characteristics. Insurance agent characteristics we focus on include number of appointments, firm affiliation, number of states licensed in, tenure, and advertising presence. We will also use text analysis from recordings to study variations in the language used by caller/consumer and insurance producer characteristics.

We measure recommendation quality as whether or not the agent recommends Medicare Advantage and the average plan price of the recommendation.

We will also look the the number of incorrect/misleading statements an agent makes as a measure of recommendation quality. Our primary outcome looks at the quality of the agent's recommendation against an expert benchmark, but we also use consumer choice, other agent recommendations, and random choice as benchmarks. We will also look at the impact of state-level differences in the regulatory and market environment.

This study seeks to understand the role of intermediaries in the Medicare market. We investigate how insurance plan recommendations are correlated with consumer and agent characteristics. The key outcome of interest is the quality of an insurance plan recommendation from an insurance producer (or insurance agent). We are also interested in the heterogeneity in recommendations by insurance agent characteristics based on publicly available data.

Not available

Consumers will be randomly assigned to insurance producers by a computer.

Consumers will be randomly assigned to insurance agents (and therefore insurance agent characteristics) by a computer. Variation in consumer characteristics such as age will also be randomly assigned.

No

We will collect approximately 400-800 observations, depending on our ability to obtain additional funding and when our current sources of research funding run out. We will exclude incomplete observations, off-topic observations, and responses from individuals who are not licensed insurance producers. (Complete responses from individuals who are not licensed can be reported separately.) We anticipate having funding for a minimum of 400 observations, however there is a chance we will have fewer than 400 observations if response rates are lower than expected or if several observations do not meet our screening criteria.

We will collect approximately 400-800 observations, depending on our ability to obtain additional funding and when our current sources of research funding run out. We will exclude incomplete observations, off-topic observations, and responses from individuals who are not licensed (complete responses from individuals who are not licensed can be reported separately). We anticipate having funding for a minimum of 400 observations, however there is a chance we will have fewer than 400 observations if response rates are lower than expected or if several observations do not meet our screening criteria. The maximum number of observations will also depend on take-up, screening, and whether we are able to obtain additional funding.

We will aim to have a 50/50 balance of the main agent characteristics of interest, but we do not expect the sample to be perfectly balanced due to the expected differences in response rates among agents. The randomization does not ensure exact balance by insurance agent characteristics such as number of states licensed in, number of appointments, etc. We will also aim to have a balanced sample of consumer characteristics such as gender.